No doubt I’m sure a lot of you are aware of this bandwidth exceeded evil mockery of a page. It’s honestly been awhile since I’ve stumbled across a page that had a 503 page on it, due to the large amounts of bandwidth that most hosts now have with their packages. Anyway, after viewing Bubs’ page and seeing that her bandwidth limit exceeded, I realized that the e-mail I was writing to her, wouldn’t get to her until she A.) Paid for more bandwidth to last her until the a new month, B.) Waited until May started to renew the bandwidth. This was because she was using her domain+hosting to receive/send out mail (at least, I’m assuming so.)
Even though I can control my own bandwidth, I have my e-mail accounts hosted off of my server. I currently use the Google Apps service for mail. There are two editions for the Apps: Standard Edition which is free, and Premier Edition which is $50/year. If you want to check out what the difference is, you can view their comparison. I currently have the standard edition, since I don’t utilize what the Premier offers.
With Google Apps, you can create your own e-mail “service” that will utilize GMail’s interface if you chose the webmail route, or you can use POP3 accounts which utilize’s Gmails POP and SMTP ports. Setting it up is very easy to do. When you go through the steps of signing up, it will provide you with two ways to authorize that you own the domain name being used. Once you have that domain name verified, you can set up your e-mail accounts through the interface (you can reach yours by http://google.com/hosted/atourworst.org. Once you have your accounts set up to your liking, you will need to log into your domain’s control panel (cpanel, dhpanel, ensim, et al.) and change your MX Entries to reflect ones provided by Google (you don’t/won’t need to use all of these, you can pick one):
- aspmx.l.google.com.
- alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
- alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
- aspmx2.googlemail.com.
- aspmx3.googlemail.com.
- aspmx4.googlemail.com.
- aspmx5.googlemail.com.
So, even if your website has exceeded bandwidth, or hell, your server is down, you’ll still be able to send and receive e-mails. The reason why I also like this is because of GMail’s spam box that will rid of all the junk, so I won’t have to worry about receiving hundreds of crap e-mails. I don’t use the webmail feature often, since I prefer POP3, but if I’m out and about (say at Mark’s place) I’ll just log into my GH account and check mail through there.
Here are some images of Google Hosted’s admin panel:
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